by Deion A. Kathawa
Under the glare of a looming impeachment, precipitated by Attorney General Letitia James’ report of Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment of 11 women, Cuomo transformed before our eyes from beloved Emmy winner to “the best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing.” And it all happened faster than you could say, “Cuomo is responsible for the deaths of more than 15,000 nursing home residents from COVID-19 because of his incompetent-at-best-and-criminal-at-worst handling of the pandemic.”
What happened? Why did the preventable, tragic deaths of 15,000 elderly New Yorkers not sink Cuomo, but the allegations of 11 women about sexual misconduct on his part did?
Russell Berman of the far-left Atlantic thinks he knows. He lays it out in plain English in the subtitle of his article, “Why Cuomo Finally Resigned”: “Democrats hold their leaders to higher standards than Republicans do. When they abandoned the New York governor, he had no choice but to quit.” Of course, this is self-serving, virtue-signaling pablum. Utter nonsense. On August 24, Cuomo will be replaced by Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat. And after that, deep-blue New York state will elevate another Democrat to the governor’s mansion as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow. The kingdom is secure.
But this is an alluring maneuver. Crowing that your “side” polices its members’ wrongdoing better than the other “side” does when there is absolutely no downside to doing so is entirely expected. Would you be surprised if a poll showed 100 percent of children think having candy for dinner is a good idea?
Similar logic is at play here.
Democratic pundits and politicians, having extirpated the lewd, grabby-hands Cuomo from the New York governorship, will point to that result forever after as proof that they’re more moral than Republicans. There is zero downside for them in the move. You want proof?
Virginia’s Democratic Governor Ralph “Blackface” Northam didn’t step down; his lieutenant governor and attorney general, both Democrats, were mired in their own scandals, and the next in line to possibly take his place was a Republican. And do we even need to mention Bill Clinton, whose resignation would have crippled Al Gore in the next presidential election?
I rest my case.
So, having dispensed with Berman’s transparently false explanation for why Cuomo resigned so suddenly, we can consider the actual reason. And like most things in these past 18 months, it’s only partially related to the coronavirus. But it’s really quite straightforward, once you see it.
The elderly aren’t loyal Democrats – and they simply aren’t important, let alone critical, to Democrats’ electoral prospects. Career-obsessed, college-educated women, however, definitely are. Which is why the knives came out when those 11 women blew the whistle on Cuomo’s sexual impropriety but not when those in the over-65 crowd needlessly suffocated to death on ventilators en masse on his watch.
It’s that simple.
The data bear this out. In 2014, Gallup noted that those over 65 “have moved from a reliably Democratic group to a reliably Republican one over the past two decades. . . . Over the last seven years, seniors have become less Democratic, and have shown an outright preference for the Republican Party since 2010.” According to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of the 2018 electorate, “older voters continued to be the Republican Party’s most loyal age group. Trump carried voters ages 65 and older by a 9-point margin in 2016; Republican candidates for the House won this group by 6 points in 2018 (52% to 46%).” As The Hill reports, the only group in 2018 to break for Republicans was those over the age of 65; a majority of those in all other age groups voted Democrat.
Women, especially those who are unmarried, are a solid constituency for Democrats. Pew finds: “In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won men by 11 points (52% to 41%) and Hillary Clinton won women by 15 (54% to 39%), for a difference of 26 points. In 2018, women supported Democratic candidates by a similar margin (18 points, 58% to 40%) . . . Unmarried voters were strongly Democratic in both years (58% to 34% for Clinton in 2016 and 64% to 33% for Democratic House candidates in 2018).” And the more educated you are, like lots of Cuomo’s accusers are, the more likely you are to vote for Democrats: In 2018, “the Democratic Party maintained a wide margin among college-educated White adults. In 2016, Democrats won this group by 17 points (55% to 38%) and in 2018 by a nearly identical 18-point margin (58% to 40%).”
With this picture in place – i.e., relatively younger, unmarried women with college degrees are a core Democratic constituency, while the elderly aren’t (and haven’t been since at least 2010) – this result makes perfect sense. The Democrats know where their bread is buttered, which is why Cuomo’s fall from grace resulted not from the agonizing, excess deaths of 15,000 elderly people from COVID-19, but from 11 educated women’s allegations of his sexual misconduct. (If this analysis strikes you as too callous or over the top, consider that Democrats, since Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, have actively cheered the slaughter of unborn babies, all because their mothers vote blue.) For Democrats, seeming virtuous is more important than actually being virtuous.
The reality is now inescapable: Democrats only stand up for those who give them power – power that they use for their own benefit and the benefit of their clients. As this repulsive series of events shows, those who oppose them are playing a high-stakes game with their very lives.
Vote Republican at your own risk.
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Deion A. Kathawa is an attorney who hails from America’s heartland. He holds a J.D. from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Subscribe to his “Sed Kontra” newsletter.
